BiographyJohn Millington Synge was born on April 16, 1871 to a middle class Protestant family. He was educated at private schools in Dublin and studied piano, flute, violin, music theory and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He was a talented student and attended Trinity College where he studied Irish and Hebrew. During this time Synge encountered the writings of Darwin and developed and interest in the Aran Islands. Reading Darwin coincided with a crisis of faith and Synge abandoned the Protestant religion of his upbringing. Post college he went to Germany to pursue a career in music but found that he was too shy to perform so he quit and began pursuing writing. In 1894 Synge moved back to Ireland for a short time and then to Paris to study literature and language at the Sorbonne. In 1896, Synge visited Italy to study language before returning to Paris. Later that year he met William Butler Yeats who recognized his talent and encouraged him to live in the Aran Islands for a while and then return to Dublin to devote himself to creative work. Beginning in 1898, Synge spent five consecutive summers on the islands collecting stories and folklore. It was this same year that he wrote his first play When the Moon Hat Set. Two years later, in 1900 he sent his play to the Irish Literature Theatre but it was rejected. He was though, published in the New Ireland Review with an account of his life on the islands. 1901 saw the construction of his second two plays, Riders to the Sea and Shadow of the Glen. The latter of which was his first play to be performed on stage in Dublin. In 1904, Yeats and Lady Gregory found the Abbey Theatre and produce Riders to the Sea. Synge was appointed Literary Advisor to the theatre and became one of the directors of the company. In 1907 Synge’s book length journal The Aran Islands was published. It is a slow paced reflection of life on the islands and reflects Synge’s belief that beneath...

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...﻿Riders to the Sea by the Irish playwright J.M Synge is a one act drama, which in essence is a tragedy, yet an unusual one. Unlike in traditional tragedies, the hero(ine) of the play does not put up (or even stand) a fighting chance, but undergoes a character transformation, which is more tragic than the demise of a hero.
Maurya, the main character, is an old woman. Yet, most importantly, she is a mother; a mother of six sons who had all perished in thesea. She had had a difficult time bringing them up, as her husband was also a victim of the sea. Maurya has undergone a great deal of suffering, which makes her an anxious mother during the first half the play.
Like any mother, she too is protective. However, in Maurya’s case her protectiveness borders on paranoia. This is evident in her words when Bartley is about to leave for the sea.
“He won’t go this day with the wind rising from the south and west. He won’t go this day….”
And even though her daughters find her fear to be ravings of “an old woman”, they are not without reason. She seems to have the “sixth sense” that mothers have regarding her children, as she sees the vision of Michael riding behind Bartley as he goes off to sea, which is a forewarning of the impending death of Bartley.
“What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?”
Maurya is not concerned about economic interests of life when it...

...Riders to the Sea: The Unseen Character
Throughout literature there are numerous examples of characters that are mentioned in the work and yet never actually make an appearance onstage or in the book; famous examples include Godot in Waiting for Godot, or Sauron from the Lord of the Rings. These "unseen" characters hold a certain power and terror for the characters of the work, as well as the audience that they are intended for. These characters are never seen, only mentioned with a certain reverence or awe, and thought of as all powerful beings. They leave something to the imagination for a reader or audience member, we can imagine the worst about these characters, what kind of power they hold over the beloved characters in the story because we don't know what they look like and therefore cannot be proven wrong by their physical limitations. This literary device can even be seen in the way people worship God from the Bible, no one has truly ever seen Him (depending on your beliefs), and yet He is worshipped, loved, and feared all at the same time. In Riders to the Sea by John M. Synge, the sea can also be thought of as one of these "unseen" all powerful characters.
The sea so intricately affects the lives of the members of the poor Irish family in this play, as well as the people of the Aran Islands. They live off of the sea, yet the sea is also a taker of...

...Riders to the sea
Summary of the play Riders to the Sea by John Millington Synge
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The play begins with Maurya, who has fallen into a fitful sleep. She is certain that her son, Michael, has drowned, even though she has no proof, and has been constantly grieving for nine days. Cathleen, her daughter, is doing household chores when Nora, another daughter arrives. She quietly slips into the kitchen with a bundle that had been given to her by a young priest. In the bundle are clothes taken from the body of a man who drowned in the far north. They were sent to Maurya's home, hoping that she would be able to identify the body.
Maurya begins to look as if she is going to wake up soon, so the daughters hide the bundle until a time when they are alone. Maurya awakes, and her fear for losing her only remaining son Bartley intensifies her grieving for Michael. Keep in mind, she has already lost five sons and a husband to the sea. The priest claims that that "insatiable tyrant" will not take her sixth. However, Bartley proclaims that he is going to venture over to the mainland that same day, in...

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issue 8 / 2013
Naturalist Aesthetics in John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World
Gabriel Sunday Bamgbose Abstract: Efforts have always been made by literary scholars and critics to read the aesthetics of John Millington Synge‟s drama. However, little attention has been paid to the naturalistic dimension of Synge‟s plays. This study, therefore, investigates the naturalist aesthetics in Synge‟s dramaturgy. This is in an attempt to show that individuals‟ attitudes in certain contexts are conditioned by the forces of the environment they inhabit. The study adopts the naturalist dramatic theory in order to account for the intricate connection between human beings and nature. Also the study engages aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis to unveil the psychological implications of the actions and reactions of the individuals in Synge‟s plays. For the purpose of critical analysis, two of Synge‟s plays are selected – Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World. The study maintains that Synge‟s dramaturgy is influenced, in fact enriched by his close study of the Irish peasantry in the Aran Island. Both texts selected for this study reveal that Synge recreates and records the contemporary life of the Islanders in a journalist and objective style. The people‟s struggle for life in their Darwinian environment is captured in different dramatic forms. While Riders to...

...Riders to the sea
SUMMARY:
This story begins with a young Irish girl baking and spinning in a fisherman''s cottage on the west coast of Ireland. Her sister comes in, bearing the clothes of man washed up drowned up the coast. They are waiting for their brother Michael to be found--he disappeared over a week earlier, and they know he is dead, though hope never dies really until one knows for sure. They do, and they finally have to tell their mother, and that he got a decent burial by the parish priest in a place several days to the north. Meanwhile, their younger brother has come by, getting ready to go on a very dangerous journey to sell some horses at the Fair. His mother is angry with him for wanting to go at all, as the weather is bad. The sisters send her out to give hime some bread and her blessing, but she comes back and says she could not--and worse, that she saw her dead son, Michael, riding one of the horses, the little grey one. She is telling how her other menfolk died and the women came keening, as they actually do with her youngest and only son left. She had bought wood for Michael''s coffin and it finds its use for Bradley, whom the grey pony knocked into the sea, where he drowned.
This play lacks, I think, the characteristic HAMARTIA, the deep flaw in the character, that brings about the tragic character''s downfall, unless you consider the hero to be her son Bradley, who refuses to listen to his mother, and went...

...SYNGE’S “RIDERS TO THE SEA”:
The Colonial Image Refuted
Riders to the Sea is a tragedy portraying the sort of poor Irish peasant family which had previously supplied material for comedies on London stages. Though set in contemporary Ireland, the play provides a window into the life of the people in ancient times: the life of the Aran community is archaic: untouched by modern life, untouched by colonialism.
The power of thesea is the main theme of the play: it is both provider and destroyer; it provides life, connection with the mainland, but it takes life. The dramatic structure of the play centres around the sea: in the beginning there is suspense as to whether the sea has given back the dead body of the young man it has taken. At the end there is suspense as to whether the last remaining son will survive the storm. The power of the elements is demonstrated to the audience in the opening scene as the wind tears open the door of the cottage. The main epic speech describes the destruction of the men of the family. As the old woman tells of past tragedies, the next and last one is re-enacted. This shows the audience that her presentiments and fears were justified; it demonstrates the struggle with the elements and the cycle of death; the ancient ritual of the community in the face of death; the stoic resignation and strength of the old woman.
Many elements of the play...

...﻿THE SEA by James Reeves
The main idea of The Sea by James Reeves is that the sea is similar to a dog in so
many ways. They both share similar characteristics and behaviour.
In fact, one can look at this poem as one long metaphor, mainly focusing on the
similarity between the sea and the dog.
The very first line of the first stanza spells out the metaphor quite clearly: “The sea is
a hungry dog”.
Moreover, the rest of the poem reinforces this idea by frequently referring to a dog’s
physionomy: teeth, jaws, gnaws, bones, paws, sounds (howls, snores, licking,
moans), and movement (rolls, bounds to his feet, shaking his wet sides).
In the first stanza, the angry sea is described as a hungry dog who is gnawing at a
bone. In fact, in this poem the sea is continuously described in terms of dog
imagery: “clashing teeth and shaggy jaws”, “he gnaws”, “bones”, “licking his greasy
paws”.
In the second stanza, Reeves compares the rough and stormy sea at night to an
uncontrollable wet dog who “shakes his wet sides”. The waves crashing into the
cliffs also bring to mind an image of a dog in a tub of water: When the dog moves,
there are waves, and they crash upon the walls and tub, causing little droplets to fall
back down into the tub. In the sea the waves, similarly, crash on the cliffs.
The main twist in this poem...

...﻿Riders to the Sea is a famous one-act tragic play by John Millington Synge containing both modern and classical elements in it. The play is modern in that it deals with the sorrows and predicaments of a common human being and it is classical in that it maintains the classical principles of drama as laid down in Aristotle’s Poetic. Simply we can say that Riders to the Sea is a modern tragedy in classical settings and with classical overtones.
Unlike Greek tragedies, Riders to the Sea deals with the sufferings of a common human being named Maurya who is the head of an Irish peasant-cum fisherman family. While Greek tragedies dealt with the sufferings of high-born people, modern tragedies deal with the sufferings of common people. And while Greek tragedies tell the stories of kings and princes or people of kingly status, which do not resemble the sufferings of the whole mass of people of that country, a modern tragedy tells the story of a common man whose sorrows, sufferings and predicaments are not individual, rather resemble the sorrows and sufferings of the whole mass of people of the protagonist’s class in his/ her own country as well as in other countries. Therefore the story of a modern tragedy is general and universal but the story of a Greek tragedy remains the story of a particular man or a particular family; it is not general or universal. Hence the story of Oedipus Rex is the...